Abstract

Installing Plan 9 on a Raspberry Pi 3

These are the notes taken in the planning and initial execution phase of this project from 10 - 15 August 2016.

This is commentary added after the installation and is intended to go into more details about why we did what we did, and what we learned.

We've been intermittent Plan 9 users since the early 90s when the OS first became available to academic sites only. It's a next generation Unix that addresses many of the issues that were found with the Unix approach. It also brough in the first wave of distributed (what we call cloud services now) computing along with the Amoeba OS (which gave us Python). It consists of process, filesystem, I/O, and authorization servers that use a 'everything is a file' interface.

System:
Raspberry Pi 3
Installation Process:
Warning: Always work from copies if any master SD cards, the installation process wipes out the original contents when the install is done.

Use the raw disk device (it has no buffering) so it will go much faster.

sudo dd bs=1m if=9pi.img of=/dev/rdisk3

This took a lot less time than expected, the Plan 9 image isn't that big.
Start: 01:12
End: 01:14
The output of the above commands is ‘silent’ meaning it doesn’t give you any update while it’s processing. You can send a SIGINFO (Ctrl+t) for current status.